Smells Like Sunday
When I was a child, my father would pile us in the car on Sunday mornings to go for a ride. Most of the time we would end up in Dingman’s Ferry which is a small town set on the Delaware River in northern Pennsylvania. The smell of my father’s cigar permeated the car making me slightly nauseous during the hour and a half trip. We would cross over the toll bridge and on the right side of the road was the Riverview Tavern. My father and Uncle Karl had owned the tavern in the 30’s and Uncle Karl kept it going during World War II when my father was in the army. When he came home and he and my mother decided to stay married, my mother convinced him to sell the place since she didn’t want me to grow up as a tavern owner’s daughter.
But I think his heart was still there so we’d drive up there so we’d drive up there on Sundays. He had sold to a German couple Rudy and Ida who despite Pennsylvania’s blue laws would open up the bar for us. The smell of stale beer and cigarettes transports me back to the tavern on a Sunday morning. We sat on the bar stools and Uncle Rudy made up hamburgers and French fries on the grill. My dad would have a beer and my mother would have a ginger ale. Sometimes Uncle Rudy would open the dance hall behind the bar and I would go back there among the Rheingold signs, the wagon wheel chandeliers, the antlers and mounted deer heads and that stale tavern smell and imagine myself grown up and dancing with some handsome man in uniform.
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